Sunday, February 5, 2012

Mural at the Caroline Elementary School


Here are some photos of the mural about NY and Finger Lakes Region history at the Caroline Elementary School, which was funded by IPEI and a Local Capacity grant from the Community Arts Partnership.

I presented an assembly to the whole school on the project last April, and the students got all excited.  We then started to get to work. We had 6 days of development and composition, which meant that I met with every third through fifth grade class in the library to get images from the internet during their Library Time. Then I met with each class for 15 minutes to show them the composition.  Finally, I worked with every third through fifth grader for 15-30 minutes individually, and with some students for much longer. The mural is all curriculum-based: third grade studies Finger Lakes and NY State, fourth grade studies the Iroquois Nation and fifth grade studies immigration and the Erie Canal. Taking all the students’ images, I came up with the composition for the 143-foot-long mural.

The goal of this project was to create a teaching tool to help students learn both subject matter and art. The teachers have already implemented the mural as a teaching tool in third and fifth grade. It would seem impossible for a student graduating from Caroline not to know the Finger Lakes and NY State Region, now that they walk down this hall each day. This mural really accomplished everything I wanted it to.

Every student and most of the faculty put their handprint on the mural.